Hello and welcome to the Fiddle Studio podcast featuring tunes and stories from the world of traditional music and fiddling . I'm Megan Beller and today I'll be bringing you a setting of House of my Own from an Irish session at the Art House Bar in Baltimore , Maryland . Hello everyone , I hope you are well .
Today I'm going to be talking about kind of a funny topic playing with the metronome . Just to introduce you to this idea , if you haven't fiddled with the metronome maybe you'll be inspired to try it after this episode . I grew up with a pretty rocky relationship with my metronome . My violin teacher certainly encouraged me to use it .
I would mostly ignore it and then sometimes at the very last minute before an audition or a lesson , try to get some hard part up to speed as quickly as I could , using the metronome at the very last minute .
But I never used it for my fiddling , so I hadn't fiddled with a metronome or ever really just put it on to practice too , and the first time I saw other musicians doing this was when I was in college , in conservatory , and I noticed that some people would practice with a metronome running either in headphones or just on in their practice room , and most of the
people doing this were jazz musicians , so I noticed jazz drummers and bass players practicing with a metronome at different speeds . One of the interesting things about this to me was that all of these players all had very good time At the time .
I thought my time was pretty good too when I started putting together groups of students to play fiddle tunes together , including jazz musicians and drummers . We didn't always fit together . We were having trouble staying together .
So that was the first time that I thought , well , maybe it's time for me to try this practicing technique and try out playing the metronome with my fiddling , because I'd only ever used it for classical music , mainly as a way to just take a hard part , slow it way down and then inch it up .
The metronome , you know , one click by one click , going faster and faster . You know , one click by one click , going faster and faster . I definitely had a moment I remember what it felt like in the practice room where I thought , well , is something wrong with the battery ? Is this metronome broken ? Because my fiddling was not fitting in with the beat .
So that was the first time that I realized , at the age of 20 , 21 , that I wasn't playing the fiddle with really , really solid time .
I was speeding up and slowing down as I was playing and in order to really learn how to play exactly with the beat , I had to slow down probably to like 70 , 80 beats per minute , play my fiddle tunes like that with the metronome and get them really tight and then speed it back up to jam and dance tempo between 105 and 120 . I'm really glad I did this .
I feel a lot more confident in my time now . I still once in a while get my metronome out just to make sure that I'm keeping the beat okay . It helped me have a sense of how fast I was playing . It also helped me just lock into the beat , and I used it as a dance musician .
If you're playing for beginning dancers , you don't want to lock into what they're doing . You have to keep the beat for them . But when you're playing as a dance musician for experienced dancers , well , they'll often wear dance shoes that make some noise on the floor and they'll be keeping the beat with their feet .
One of the pleasures of playing for dances is locking into the beat that they're keeping and of course , they're keeping a beat listening to what you're playing . So the music and the sound of the feet on the floor pull together .
It's really a wonderful feeling to be playing and you start to feel , like the music that you're playing and the steps that they're taking , that they're both expressions of the same thing . It's hard to describe , but I highly recommend learning to play with the metronome . Whether you play for dancers or not , it's always good .
You might discover some things about your playing and you might have that moment where you wonder if your metronome is broken . It happens to all of us . Our tune today is a setting of another slip jig from the Irish session at the Art House , which is a bar in Baltimore .
The full name of this tune is I have a House of my Own with a Chimney Built on Top of it , and it's a slip jig in E minor . There is some discussion on the session that this might be the longest tune name on the session . I have a house of my own with a chimney built on top of it . For short , I call it House of my Own .
It's a tune composed by Junior Crehan , who was a fiddler in County Clare , born in 1908 . Crehan started playing Irish music at an early age on the concertina before switching to the fiddle . My understanding is that he studied fiddling with Fatty Casey , also in County Clare .
At the time I read in an article that he played in the same pub in Cork for 70 years . That's kind of amazing . He wasn't widely recorded but wrote several tunes that are still played and beloved in the Irish repertoire . If you go to the session you can look up Junior Crehan and see the tunes that he wrote . This is a really nice tune .
We enjoyed working on it . Here we go .
Thank you , hey . Thanks so much for listening .
You can head over to fiddle studiocom for the sheet music to this and all of the tunes I teach . I'll be back next time with another tune for you . Have a wonderful day .